Monday, September 21, 2009

18th of September, 2009

Everything that should be there was there: excessive amounts of meat and alcohol, parties and dancing, families and friends, stomach aches and hangovers. Well, not all of those represent my personal case, but hey... I was there.

The 18th of September is about all of those things and a lot more, so I tried to fit in as much as I could! The only thing I really let myself down on is cueca dancing. Its been my goal to learn how to dance the cueca for a few years now. However, my boyfriend doesn't know how to dance the cueca and isn't interested in learning, and I'm not interested in learning just so that he can send me off dancing with old crazy drunk men. We're obviously both quite stubborn! (Truthfully, I don't even like the dance itself, or dancing in general, that much, but I would like to learn for the sake of knowledge and celebration.)

Also, I was a little bummed about missing out on the huge fondas in Viña and Valpo, because I'd gone to one in Sporting in 2006 and have since been hoping to celebrate there again. Last year we left the cities and went to a fonda in Catapilco, which wasn't much to brag about. But since my boyfriend doesn't feel like the big city fondas are quite the real thing, this year we we split our time between the coast and then the countryside, where we went to a fonda in Lo Campo, which turned out to have been quite appropriately named. Its alsopossible I may have stood out a tad.

(cueca dancing)

(finishing up a cueca dance...the competition in my head named them "cutest couple,")

Aside from the celebrations, the weekend activities pretty much consisted of this:

this,and this...

Seriously- Chileans are BBQ fanatics! We made the rounds and over the few days ended up traveling around to 4 different houses, each of course offering us loads of meat and alochol.

Yes, In theory that's great but I'm a vegetarian and my boyfriend doesn't drink... and its common knowledge that people get a little insistent when they've had a little too much to drink (which, of course, was always the case).

As you can imagine, when necessary we found ourselves swapping glasses and plates to secretly double up on each other's weakness, him having eaten half a herd of something or other and me trying not to walk home zig-zaged.